I absolutely, utterly hate the lack of size optimization in video games nowadays. Usually that's a thing for AAA games that wanna take up 200GB of your SSD because they absolutely need their 320 kbps uncompressed audio and 4k textures for every hair on the protag's body, but I just got hit by this on somewhere much, much different: lowly little match-3 games. Literally one of the simplest things that you can possibly make. No way that any dev could
possibly screw that up and bloat your computer with 2D simplicity, right? Surely no way in the world....
Well, here comes
One More Please, a game recently put out on itch.io that combines Match-3 with """horror""" elements (ie, oh-so-dark imagery and questionable writing). It's not good mechanics-wise, the guy who made it is a student so I can't lampoon him too much, and the first pic is how it looks.
It's a 720p screenshot, the lowest the game lets you go, you could see this crap in 4k if you want to, but aside that, why the whining about size? Well, for some unfathomable reason that escapes even God himself, this small little project was developed in fucking
UNREAL ENGINE. Unreal, a 3D framework made for AAA-level use, was used for a game like
that. The size reflects it too. Extracted out this game is 700 Megabytes. Almost a whole CD would be taken up by just this one bare-bones barely functional game. (Fun Fact: 50 megabytes of this is because he left the Unreal Prerequisites setup exe in there as well, as if the other 600+ MB was not enough of a chunk).
Compare that to what I think is the best looking, graphically, in its genre, Bejeweled 3, made by the great PopCap, the second picture. 768p screenshot here to make the graphics juxtaposition fair.
Besides, well, just obviously being a better experience in every way imaginable, this game, despite the tons more graphics and game logic it has, clocks in at only 95 megabytes. Could fit 7 copies of this game in the footprint that little horror boy above it is taking up. I hate it. Yeah, I have a 1 TB SSD in this PC so it's not like I'm starved for space or anything, but it's the principle. There has to be even one fuck given for optimization somewhere with these modern programmers. Do they just not teach it at all? Just because there's no internet speed or disk space limitations should not mean that it balloons to near infinity.
It's not even that making things in a smaller space can't be done, either.
Here's another very bare-bones looking match-3 also posted recently. It's got, as with every other indie nowadays apparently, roguelike RPG concepts (the indie zeitgeist style cloning is another thing I'm disliking more and more recently, but that's to whine about probably in another thread). Last picture, similar window size to the others.
Very bare-bones that one. But you know what, the size of it actually makes sense! Under 7 megabytes for what's pretty much a pre-alpha, half of that being generic 8-bit slop for a soundtrack because indie zeitgeist. I love those old causal puzzle games, and they frequently impress me with how much stuff they can pack into a small space when size is given even the slightest consideration. I don't expect .kkrieger from one-man shows, but... wow. it's almost impressive a lot of the time just how bloated the state of creating a video game has gotten. Thank you for reading my autsitic whining of the week.
